From the beach near our house, I can look southeast across Boundary Bay and see the Cherry Point oil refinery at Ferndale, Wash.

It is about 25 kilometres away, closer to me than my office downtown.

It is especially visible at night. With its lit towers and occasional flares of burn-off, it glows brightly across the darkened bay, and you can see wraithlike plumes of steam rising into the night air above it. For anyone living on the edges of Boundary Bay, the refinery, owned by BP, is a constant presence, one of those distinguishing landmarks on the horizon of the bay’s circumscribed world. An international border runs through the middle of that world, but that line is an invisible human construct. Nature ignores it.

Live here long enough and you don’t give the refinery a second thought. It’s just there, and it’s been there since 1971, refining oil that, for the most part, has been brought down the west coast by tanker from Alaska. (A smaller portion arrives by pipeline from Canada.)

Since its beginnings, it has greatly increased its capacity. From 100,000 barrels per day in the 1970s, it now refines 234,000 barrels per day, making it the largest refinery in Washington.

It has company. The state has four refineries near the Canadian border, two in Ferndale and two in Anacortes, and the economic life of Metro Vancouver is inextricably linked to them. Of the products they produce, Metro Vancouver receives about 20,000 barrels of gasoline. Per day. Cherry Point also produces the majority of jet fuel for Vancouver International Airport, not to mention for Sea-Tac and Portland International.

Yet in the heated debate over the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, and the Kinder Morgan proposal to triple the capacity of its Trans Mountain pipeline to 890,000 barrels per day, the long and continued existence of these Washington refineries somehow gets lost in the shouting.

It is as if by virtue of being on the other side of an international border they have no bearing on the issue, as if the environmental danger they represent, or, on the other side of the coin, the long record of operation they can claim has no bearing on us. Out of sight, out of mind.

But they aren’t out of sight. They’re next door, and if there were a spill from a tanker bound for one of them, the crude oil they would release wouldn’t respect the 49th parallel. Boundary Bay, the Gulf Islands and the Strait of Juan de Fuca would be imperilled. For that matter, they are imperilled.

At present, more than 500 U.S.-bound oil tankers transit the Strait of Juan de Fuca every year. If they come from Alaska, they sail outside the Canadian Tanker Exclusion Zone (between 65 to 125 kilometres offshore depending where they are on the coast), and then take on pilots once they enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

When they emerge out of the Juan de Fuca, they head due north through Rosario Strait. Rosario Strait winds between the San Juan Islands and the mainland, and studies have shown it to be the most dangerous tanker route in Washington. At one point, the shipping lane passes between the twin reefs of Peapod Rocks and Buckeye Shoals, which are less than two kilometres apart. (Prince William Sound, the waterway the Exxon Valdez ran aground in, was 20 kilometres wide.)

According to Scott Dean, a BP spokesman out of the company’s Houston, Texas offices, there “have been no major incidents involving crude tanker voyages to our refinery.”

This is true, though there have been accidents at the refinery, including a fire last February that shut it down for a month. There have also been accidents in Rosario Strait involving tankers headed for other refineries, including — according to a 1989 Seattle Times series on Washington tanker traffic — the 1964 explosion of the unloaded tanker Bunker Hill, which sank to the bottom of the strait, and the 1983 near-grounding of the tanker Sohio Intrepid, which lost power and was 125 metres from the rocks before tugs reached it at the last minute and towed it to deeper waters.

Why is any of this important to the debate over Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain?

It is important because of (a) the proximity of the U.S. refineries and (b) the historical context in which they exist. That U.S. oil tankers transit waters so close to B.C. that they have threatened, and continue to threaten, our environment is a 40-year fact. That we, and Washingtonians, have lived with that threat for 40 years is also a fact.

You can take from that what you will. This column and those facts aren’t meant to make a case for either side of the oil debate in B.C.

But neither should they be ignored. There is an established history of oil in that place we now call the Salish Sea, and we’ve been awash in it for decades.

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